As a non-tech startup founder, can I stop my developers from working elsewhere?

Make them FTEs and pay them more so they don't need to work multiple jobs.

Any part time contract that doesn't pay someone enough to survive and also has an exclusivity clause reeks of selfishness, entitlement, and poor ethics IMO.

Hire full-time employees and pay them well.
Most good software engineers have sideprojects. They love to work on it.

Hi @indieesaas ,
Tough story to hear.
Have you tried to talk to local devs in NL? If you can talk to someone IRL, it makes it often easier to see if you are on the same communication style and can work together.

Yeah, those contractors are very difficult to deal with. They usually also offer very low rates and charge far too many hours in the end. I started working with contractors that I know and who are approachable (somehow, at least, located in the area and not somewhere around the world - not necessarily a bad thing!).

But for doing multiple jobs: Even for the employees, working on multiple projects is not necessarily a bad thing. There are a ton of learnings out there for developers and actually if a developer asks if she can run side projects, it shows a lot of dedication to building something. This definitely filters out the 9-5 devs, only in there for the money, who you also want to filter out!

@indieesaas Find yourself a dev cofounder with enough skin in the game (your SaaS). It's said that such partnership it's like a marriage, choose wisely if you decide to do so.

What kind of problem does your SaaS solve? In what programming languages / stack has it been built?

Contractors are in business too.

Trying to force them to be solely in your employ would be like having one customer for your SaaS. They churn and you're scrambling.

Provisions like this are deal-breakers for a lot of contractors I know. It says you want the benefits of a contractor, but don't want the contractor to have the benefits as well.

Hire an employee, or hire better contractors. I'm going out on limb and guessing your contractors do hourly work which incentives them to finish slow AF. Maybe try fixed rate per project contractors? My clients love it, and I finish projects fast.

PS: Not defending the shitty contractors, I'm sorry you're in this situation. It gives contractors like me a bad rep despite trying my hardest to provide the best experience to my clients.

Just find better contractors. Commenters keep talking about full-time employment and how the contractors don't have enough work etc, but that's not the issue here is it, it's their fault for not doing the job they're paid to do.

Find a contractor that's easy to work with, delivers on time and is not hard to contact, it's a trial and error process, no need for full-time employees if you don't have the workload or NDAs etc. TBH this is not about tech only as well, I've had to go through a ton of contractors/freelancers before I found a couple that do the job perfectly.

I don’t think you should if they’re not fulltime tbh but can be wrong

I do understand and appreciate that they need more hours than what I'm offering and because of that will have multiple conflicting priorities

Sounds like the crux of the problem.

Can I add a clause in the contract to stop anyone I hire from working elsewhere and if so how would I enforce it?

Most of these non-compete clauses are unenforceable. In the U.S., if it’s even legal in your state, you can only enforce a non-compete for a small geographic area (like a city) for a certain industry (like printing companies) for a limited amount of time (like a year).

And since you are not offering full-time employment and they have to have other business engagements, that’s an unreasonable position.

Simply put, I refuse jobs over non-compete agreements. Your developers may also have attorneys that will tell them not to sign your non-compete agreement either.

On the whole, they haven't lived up to my expectations due to various reasons like not delivering on time, being hard to contact, costing more than anticipated

Hate to say it, but that’s a common industry problem that won’t go away anytime soon. Though, you can work with individual developers to improve it by communicating your expectations and helping them meet them. In addition, you should improve your own processes, management, and project requirements to help meet your goals.

At the end of the day, it’s a two-way street.

It would be useless because

1. Developers will not agree.
2. They may agree but may still continue to moonlight how will you know?
3. Assuming you know and they are in different jurisdiction it would not be enforcable.
4. Assuming they are in same jurisdiction as you are and have agreed you will have to go to courts to enforce it you will end up paying more to lawyers and courts than getting to work on your product and guess what lawyers would also behave exactly like that ignore you won't pick up phone ask you to settle or unnecssary charge you frivilous fees where would you go if this happens?

As a business person only stick you have is to not give your business or cancel the contract or release the payment only after completion of task nothing else works.

What you need is professional developer who may or may not take your work but is reliable in the sense that either completes your work on time with little supervision or informs you beforehand if there would be a slippage along with the explanation and gives you a way out of it.

I don't know what you are paying but looks like you have hired cheap contractors from fiverr/upwork etc. and you are changing them every time for work. Once you get a good developer you stick with them even paying higher rates for stability and reliability.

I have another theory on schedule slippage and that is project management is missing from the business owners side and/or vague sw requirements.

I am curious are you doing project management and still seeing this? Do you provide wireframes to your developers in your requirements?

"Can I add a clause in the contract to stop anyone I hire from working elsewhere?" 
I have seen this in contracts I have gotten and have given out

Outside of the time you pay them for and the equipment given to them, you can't really dictate what they do outside of those parameters.

Now you can try and micro manage them and hover over their every move, but that's not an environment any person wants and if they are not in a physical location, they have to report it, which makes it kind of impossible to enforce

You need to gauge the value your employees bring vs. what you will be paying them. That's what all employers do.

If you pay well you don't need to put any clause, the multiple jobs is all about making more money, if they're well paid they will prioritize your project and will deliver regardless of whether they have other projects at hand or not, yours will be number 1.

This type of clause is becoming more common. With the pandemic and the rise in home-working, more and more devs started to take on additional jobs and employers don't like it. But from a dev perspective, we're not going to take a job with a clause like this and can ask to have it removed. There are enough jobs out there that we don't have to accept terms like this. As other IHs have said, it's about communication not clauses.

To me, this is not primarily a legal question but rather an issue of clear communication, realistic expectations, and hiring good people. They are all interconnected.

If you hire somebody for a full-time position (32h - 40h a week) and pay them enough that they can reasonably live off of that money, I think it's ok ask them to only work on your project.
However, if you only hire somebody part-time, and/or don't pay them enough, I think it's very normal that they also work on other projects.

Now, their other commitments should not cut into the agreed upon work quality and work hours for your project. And this is about hiring good and experienced developers - but of course, you also need to be ready to pay them well.

You can certainly put a clause in the contract but how you enforce it, I don't know. I think what you're really looking for is a software developer to be committed to your startup because you've had bad experiences with contractors not being. Essentially, there's no guarantee with either employees or contractors regardless of whether they work elsewhere. You'd need to be strict on deliverables, which will be easier to do if they are a full-time employee. Therefore, it doesn't matter if they work elsewhere as long as they are meeting all the targets you set.

hey!! what's the update?

Hello Annabelle,
I am sad to read your experience but it reminds me of mine.
What I can advise you is to really have control over your project, even if it means developing it in nocode at the start and then doing it as you please once you have mastered web development technologies.
I've worked with dozens of remote developers and honestly I haven't found any that I expected, with or without a contract.
As a result, my projects are currently all suspended until I finish training in bubble and finish my fullstack training and I even have clients who have turned against me because we had to make their site and I stopped with the last developers who accompanied me after realizing that their productivity did not correspond to what was agreed.
Good luck to you

Software consultant from the Global South here. More than 10 years working like that. A few considerations:

• If you pay well, you will get priority over anything else.
• If you pay well and give enough work, they will probably drop anything else.
• Good engineers will create software that works. Great engineers will create software that people can trust.

Best of lucks

You are hiring contractors;
They don't deliver in time and you are having a myriad of problems with them;
And the "solution" you find is to introduce exclusivity clause to their contracts?

There are possibly lots of problems here:

• Maybe you are hiring very cheap labour from the Global South?
• Scope is unclear or changing?
• Wrong people are hired. Maybe you are hiring junior devs who doesn't have experience without any project manager involvement? Maybe you are hiring people who doesn't have knowledge in your stack?

Please try to understand the root cause before finding a solution.

This kind of development also has a risk of creating a lot of technical debt.

Hey! I'm a freelancer/contractor as well with a good record of work discipline, my recommendations from the past clients say so. I'd love to help. Ping me, if you must.

Most good software engineers have sideprojects. They love to work on it.

Contractors are a big NO if you have no tech leadership onboard on your side. You are the ideal customer to scam, essentially.

Sounds like you are unable to give them enough hours. Then you can't really expect them to just sit and wait for work from you.

Hi @indieesaas 👋

I understand you're looking to grow your SaaS and willing to have developers committed full-time to your project.
As a matter of fact, I advise non-tech founders who had the same trouble as you with tech contractors, so perhaps I can help you with that as well 😊

(As a side note, I've answered questions on how to operate SaaS for non tech-founders here in Indiehacker, extracted on a post and in my blog, if it may help others as well 🙇).

The general idea with contractors is that they are selling their time for money. 💸
Ideally, the more their time is worth, the more they are willing to use it to work on your project. Obviously, in practice, various other parameters might influence the decision (interest for the project, potential, other team members, proximity, ...) but as a general rule, the money is the number one motive for contractors.

One common way to insure contractors focus on the project is to give them more work.
Most of the time, I've seen contractors reduce their daily price if you allow them to work on the project multiple days per week.
Let's assume the daily price is 300€ per day (for a junior developer), some will agree to go 250€ if you assure them at least 3 days a week of work. On a regular month, it means 750€ per week, for 4 weeks ~= 3000€.

Still, you've no guarantee they will meet your schedule requirements, price expectations or even deliver good results, so you're basically fighting against wind. 😩

The important thing to notice here is that your real problem is not really to force people to commit on the project, but rather define your needs, set the scope of the project properly and find the best match for this scope. 🎯

I will give you with an analogy that is not tech related, perhaps this might help you understand better.
Let's assume you've bought a very big house and have a great idea to transform it into a vacation place people can rent. 🏰
Unfortunately, for the sake of the example, you've no skills in repairing houses, you only have information there is a market in the area and you have customers willing to pay.
In order to be able to rent as fast as possible, you need for sure all the structural part of the house to be okay (roof, walls, foundations, ...), so you need multiple workers specialised in this department to verify each part. 👷‍♂️👷‍♂️👷‍♂️👷‍♂️
Then, you need to refresh the different part of the house based on what your customers are looking for.

• Is it the house they are really interested in or it's proximity to other services?
• How many rooms do you need to start creating revenue?
• What is the expected quality of service? Can it grow over time? And so on...

Once you've done that, you're able to assess the amount of work, define a budget and look for contractors to get the work done. 🕵️‍♂️

The only risk left is if the contractors is going to be late, or do bad work.
So how do you solve this ?
You make them start small, and slowly give them bigger tasks (= more expensive tasks). You're straightforward on the amount of work/schedule to expect and this is a joined decision. 📈

The main point here is that the relation with a contractor is not fixed, it evolves with time. The common mistake (been there, done that, and so did most of the non-tech founders I advise) is to believe the relation with contractors is one-off.
We talked, he is great, I hire him at a rate, my problem is solved.
It's rarely that, and you will often need to step in to make sure the work is done and the schedule is met. 🤝

To go back to your current problem as a non-tech founder here is the question to answer:

• What is your current roadmap for your SaaS? Why is that (is there a real business reason for this schedule, is this mandatory or expected, is this realistic) ?
• What is the product expectations ? Why ? Can you cut some things out and still achieve the same results in term of business?
• What are the technical area that requires an external expertise? How much is the market rate for this expertise? What are your constraints regarding this expertise ? Can you remove some of these constraints?
• What is your current budget (total budget for the operations, monthly budget to invest in the SaaS production) ? Is the budget only cashburn or is the SaaS generating revenue allowing investing in reducing your mental load by hiring someone to take the tech problem and management out of your hands ?

If you've not answered these questions on a formal manner (Notion, notebooks), I'd recommend you take some time to do it.
Have a clear vision of what you want, when, how it can be done, how much it costs and what is your budget. ❓

If you did, then it should be clear what kind of technical people you need and if you can afford it.
If you can, use the trick I explained earlier to find the good fit you're satisfied with (either contractors or hiring).
If you cannot afford it, it means that the strategy needs to be reviewed the same way you would for your house building project.
Either accept longer delay, lower your expectations or increase the budget. 🔻

Final note: In France, the only way you can prevent someone to have another work is by hiring him. It often creates a lot of overhead as you need to deal with legal issues, work regulation, salaries, days-off, etc. This is the main reason we hire contractors to do the work, they handle these for you and it's only a cost line on your account.
However, the counterpart is that's harder to find a good fit and there are a lot of bad contractors, the same that in the house building and any other industry.

I've build a product exactly to solve tech for non-tech founders: bepo Agency.
I only work with a limited set of clients (to avoid overtime/delays), deliver on time and handle all the tech/product related part.
You can contact me if you need more information 😊

Sorry for the long post, it's a tougher problem than it seems, and it should not be overlooked 🙇